Crossing the Line

Saw Crossing the Line, a documentary about the strange life of James Dresnok, an American soldier who defected to North Korea. The film is spooky and weird, using a soundtrack of computer bloops and fades to black which invoke an espionage film or an investigation of some kind. This is at odds with the rather warm and human psychological explanation the film seems to offer to explain his defection: that he was simply looking for a family. Born to immediately-divorced parents, he was foisted off on an elderly aunt and uncle who didn't know what to make of him and furthermore didn't want him. From there, he wound up in foster homes and orphanages, his unsettled life daily confronting him with the sad fact that he was unwanted. After a few run-ins with the law (juvenile delinquency, petty theft,) he joined the army and tried to make that his family. But the American Army is a difficult place to live in and eventually, in disgust, he defected to the mysterious land of the DPRK.

There he's used as a propaganda device, reading scripts about how well he lives for psychological warfare and playing the villainous american in their films. But they do take care of him. As with anything from North Korea, it's always unclear how deep the deception runs. Is James lying only to us, or to himself as well? Or does he actually believe what he says. Curiously, there were three other soldiers who defected at around the same time as James, though in unrelated incidents. James talks of one of the soldiers who felt his imprisonment more keenly than James did. James tells how this soldier claims to have been beaten by James, that he was forced to surgically remove a tattoo of a US Army logo from his bicep. James furiously declares that never was he, James, forced to do anything. That he too had removed tattoos but that was because his handlers earnestly explained the impropriety of having US insignia on his body. Does James not understand that this is coercion? Of the beatings, James declares the soldier a liar. "I'd like to kill him" James says, without any apparent irony.

The film is very interesting. As with any human life, James' does not fit into a neat narrative. This explanation of finding a family in the DPRK is tangential to the true thrust of the film which is to examine James' unusual life. He has a North Korean wife. He has children. At one point he movingly celebrates their ability to go to college, a privilege that, ignorant of school loans, he imagines would be denied in the US. All kinds of fascinating odds and ends litter this documentary. Very interesting.